Here's a quote from a friend of mine that supports himself selling VST plugins:
One of my softs stops working on certain days when cracked. On these days I have record sales. If I normally sell, say, an average of 3 copies a day, I will sell maybe 15 copies on those days where the crack stops to work. That's more than a 10% increase in sales. The effort put into that scheme was 2 days, which is less than 1% of the overall development work.
Thanks. That's really interesting, did s/he release an update to fix the crack issue or was it some kind of a server-side activation check that the changes caused software to disable itself?
It's a cat & mouse thing. He releases an update, they eventually crack it, then he starts again. He's smarter about it than most devs though. He's gotten good at tricking the crackers into thinking they've removed all the protection only to discover weeks later that they missed something.
One of my softs stops working on certain days when cracked. On these days I have record sales. If I normally sell, say, an average of 3 copies a day, I will sell maybe 15 copies on those days where the crack stops to work. That's more than a 10% increase in sales. The effort put into that scheme was 2 days, which is less than 1% of the overall development work.